I'M NOT MY PROTAGONIST! Oh, wait a minute...

By Melodie Campbell

My college Crafting a Novel students often hear me say, “You can’t make every character sound like yourself.”  And it’s true.  Most beginning novelists (at least the ones in my class) write themselves into their books.  The star of the book – the protagonist - sounds and looks an awful lot like the writer himself.  Has the same likes, dislikes, and insecurities.  But is of course, more heroic.

In fact, we come slamming up against the famous saying, “Write what you know.”

And some know themselves pretty well.  (Others, not at all, but I digress…) 

A protagonist who is a barely veiled, idealist version of yourself?  We’ll allow you that for your first book.  But if an author persists in writing the same protagonist over and over again, in every book and series they write, things get pretty stale.

So that prompted me to look at my own series to see what I had done.  Ten books in now, I held my breath. 

The Character I wish I was

I started the Land’s End Fantasy Trilogy when I was dearly in need of escape.  My mother was dying.  I remember looking at her hospital bedroom wall, and thinking, ‘if I could walk through that wall into another world right now, I would.’  That’s how the first of the series, Rowena Through the Wall, came about.  I started writing it in the hospital.

Rowena isn’t me.  She is the ‘me I wish I was,’ at least at that difficult time.  I wrote the character I wanted to be.  She’s prettier than me, more generous than I am, and in the end, more courageous.  I was dealing with the issue of courage at that time.  Courage to face what was coming and what was inevitable.  I wonder how many readers of that series would nod their heads, hearing me say that now?

The ‘Me’ my Mother Wanted Me to Be

Next I grabbed A Purse to Die For off my shelves.  This book is in a different genre – it’s amateur detective, or classic mystery, and I co-wrote it with my pal, Cindy St-Pierre.  The second book in the series, A Killer Necklace, has just come out.

The protagonist is a fashion diva – a television personality from the Weather Network.  She’s drop-dead pretty, and always put together.

I am not.  Spending more than ten minutes on my long hair is an impossible chore for me.  You won’t find high heels in my closet.  I like clothes, but am not a slave to fashion. 

But my mother was.  My mother was a fashion diva until the day she died.  We’re pretty sure she was the longest subscriber to Vogue magazine, ever.  Mom dressed me in designer clothes all my childhood.  She was delighted when I did a little modeling as a young woman.

I never quite came up to her standard of fashionista though.  “Put on some lipstick,” she would say.   

“You look like a ghost!”

Looking at the series now, I can see that the main character is the ‘me my mother wanted me to be.’  It was, in a way, my tribute to her.  Wish she could have been here when the first book was published.

The Closest I get to Me

So where am I in all my books?  That’s easy.

I’m The Goddaughter.  Sort of.  In this wacky crime caper series, the protagonist is a mob goddaughter, who doesn’t want to be one.

I’m half Sicilian.  I had a Sicilian godfather.  I had to wait until certain people died in the family before I wrote this series.

In Gina Gallo, the ambivalence is there.  ‘You’re supposed to love and support your family.  But what if your family is this one?”  Gina says this in every book of the series.  Those words came directly from my mouth.

This book is meant to be laugh out loud funny.  I let loose with my own wit, and shook off the inhibitions.  Not that I’m very inhibited normally.  But in The Goddaughter series, you get the real me peeking out.  Not idealized.  Not always upstanding.  Sometimes just looking for a way out of a real mess, possibly of my own creation.  But kind of fun to be with, I think. 

So that brings us back to the beginning.  One of the delightful things about being an author is allowing yourself to ‘become’ a character other than yourself, as you write.  Fitting yourself into their skin, so to speak.  As you write more, this becomes more fun, and more of a goal.  I LOVE putting myself into the mind of a killer in a short story, if only for a little while.  It’s a kick to ‘pretend’ to be someone else, by writing their story.

Let’s be honest: who needs drugs, if you’re an author?  THIS is the ultimate escape.

Do you relish creating characters and living their lives through your fiction?

A KILLER NECKLACE - just released!

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